I am a custom cabinet contractor and want to automatically open a couple cabinet doors. Imagine 2 regular cabinet doors, about 18" wide by 50" tall. Behind is a TV. There is space for actuators and other necessary hardware but I don’t know what would be typically used in this situation… Any suggestions?
Thanks!
I am also interested in the calculations required to determine a automatic door, actually lid, opening system. My particular project is a deck box lid made from 3/4 in plywood. it is 2 ft wide and 8 feet long and weights approx. 40 LBS. slightly more when wet. It is hinged along the 8 foot side. I would like to have the lid open 90 degrees. I would like the actuator to be inside the box.
My questions are how do I determine where to mount the actuator, how much force and stroke do I require? I would like to learn how these calculations are made so I could repeat this project with different size boxes.
Thanks for help. Do you know of a couple of the best sites to visit?
Hi flowerspower,
Welcome to the RobotShop Forum. Interesting idea and should be straightforward. First, you will need to get an idea of the stroke length and how much force is required. To do this, you can choose two contact points (one on the cabinet itself, the other on the door) and get an idea of how far apart the two points need to be for the door to open the way you want. Next, determine how much force is required to open the door at this point.
You will likely want to connect the actuators to the mains (wall) rather than a battery. Would you like the control to be a handheld remote? Toggle switch? Once you have determined these things, you likely need a motor controller.
We look forward to your reply,
This concept is hard to teach here in a forum - you need to learn about the concept of torque and 2D torque balance about the pivot point. There is a ton of free material online to help you learn this concept.
When the engineers here learned about torque, it was a module in school which lasted a few weeks, so we don’t have a list of good sites. A quick Google search shows:
teachersdomain.org/resource/lsps07.sci.phys.maf.torque/
physics.uoguelph.ca/tutorials/torque/Q.torque.intro.html